Consciousness Contradiction Hunting Part 2

I ate. I now challenge Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to a duel. I hope they win, and I bet on them to reinforce and incentivize that hope. (Part 1.)

"Mental states are characterised by two main properties, subjectivity, otherwise known as privileged access, and intentionality. Physical objects and their properties are sometimes observable and sometimes not, but any physical object is equally accessible, in principle, to anyone. From the right location, we could all see the tree in the quad, and, though none of us can observe an electron directly, everyone is equally capable of detecting it in the same ways using instruments. But the possessor of mental states has a privileged access to them that no-one else can share. That is why there is a sceptical ‘problem of other minds’, but no corresponding ‘problem of my own mind’."

I contend that the queerness of my conclusions is not the result of my premises or methods. These are the mainest of mainstream. Rather, the queerness is that my views should not already be common.

"Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind."

Whether one believes an electron is made of a substance, energy, or is just a bundle of properties - mass, electric charge, spin, and so on - the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the material electron.

To be fair this is a real problem. However, it's also an empirical fact which can be stated axiomatically by the philosopher.

Incidentally, the solution is probably inherent in the subjective nature of consciousness. Assuming two thoughts are disparate, they are inaccessible to each other. For one subject to access two thoughts probably requires they actually be the same thought. Indeed the subject is likely composed entirely of that thought due to the [homonculus fallacy] issue. I haven't fully analyzed the homonculus yet.

"First, in so far as this ‘ectoplasm’ has any characterisation as a ‘stuff’—that is, a structure of its own over and above the explicitly mental properties that it sustains—it leaves it as much a mystery why this kind of stuff should support consciousness as it is why ordinary matter should."

First, in so far as this 'energy' has any characterization as a 'stuff' -- that is, a structure of its own over and above the explicitly physical properties that it sustains -- it leaves it as much mystery why this kind of stuff should support physical existence as it is why consciousness should.

Is the pattern clear?

"Second, and connectedly, it is not clear in what sense such stuff is immaterial, except in the sense that it cannot be integrated into the normal scientific account of the physical world. Why is it not just an aberrant kind of physical stuff?"

Not connectedly.

The reason is subjectivity has the wrong kind of epistemic properties to be physical, and the epistemic impinges on the ontologic. Namely, for subjectivity, map is territory. To suppose the territory is different is to suppose the map is different, because it is where the two unite.

"The ‘consciousness' account: The view that consciousness is the substance. Account (a) allowed the immaterial substance to have a nature over and above the kinds of state we would regard as mental. The consciousness account does not. This is Descartes' view."

Smart bastard. The encyclopedia continues in this highly reasonable vein for a while.

I suspect consciousness fragments into conciousness quanta while you're asleep and reunites while dreaming or upon awakening. But this is an empirical question. Find out how consciousness is hooked to physics and it will be straightforward to answer this.

--

I find Wikipedia dense in claims but light on substantial claims, while Stanford likes to ramble.

On a whim, I checked La Wik's physicalism page. I correctly predicted they would have no 'criticism' section, such as the dualism page so conveniently has. It's as if anti-mainstream propaganda cannot be allowed to stand, while pro-mainstream propaganda is not considered icky enough to be propaganda.

Materialism at least has a stub of a criticism section.

I guess at least Stanford can claim a fair and balanced review of the subject. I certain don't feel misrepresented there. This means they firmly outperformed my expectations, which means they win. Good on them.

Consciousness Contradiction Hunting

To defeat confirmation bias, usually it's sufficient to purposefully look for disconfirming evidence. It can also be supercharged by method-acting the opposing belief, fooling the bias into working against your 'true' belief, and I've done this several times for dualism. Here I hope to demonstrate that I did not find any serious obstacles, and that the above technique would have let me admit if I had. Perhaps I will yet find such an obstacle, as I haven't fully analyzed yet. While I have privileged information - I have in the past mistakenly thought I found obstacles - it would be nice to have an unprivileged version. (Part 2.)

Overall I expect to demonstrate that a dualist need not disagree with mainstream facts, but merely point out an overlooked interpretation.

"Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality."

Indeed. In my case, I'm looking for an entity which has both objective and subjective properties.

"Critics of dualism have often asked how something totally immaterial can affect something totally material"

One of Descartes' mistakes. They indeed cannot affect each other. At best, we would have a violation of Newton's third law; epiphenomenal consciousness can see physics but not the reverse. To be clear, I find epiphenomenalism absurd.

"First, it is not clear where the interaction would take place. For example, burning one's finger causes pain. Apparently there is some chain of events, leading from the burning of skin, to the stimulation of nerve endings, to something happening in the peripheral nerves of one's body that lead to one's brain, to something happening in a particular part of one's brain, and finally resulting in the sensation of pain." 

Hardly unclear. Subjective entities don't have physical locations. Further, we can see the causal chain goes through the finger but the nexus of consciousness is in the brain. If we disconnect the finger, we don't feel it anymore, but we do feel everything upstream of the disconnection, thus allowing us to consistently define 'upstream.'

It may be difficult to work out the stream direction within the brain, since that's where the ability to report sensations comes from. If we destroy the vocal processor, we have (as yet) no way of knowing whether it was upstream or downstream of consciousness.

"However, there is a second problem about the interaction. Namely, the question of how  the interaction takes place, where in dualism "the mind" is assumed to be non-physical and by definition outside of the realm of science."

Non-physical does not mean by definition out of the realm of science, at least if they mean to imply that consciousness is defined to be in contradiction to naturalism. Non-objective does not mean immune to investigation and inquiry.

Not to say dualists haven't made this mistake. But it is a mistake.

"Many physicists and consciousness researchers have argued that any action of a nonphysical mind on the brain would entail the violation of physical laws, such as the conservation of energy."

As always, I hate to provide aid and comfort to 'quantum is woo' types, but in this case they're not far wrong. The apparently random nature of quantum decoherence allows something to affect physics without violating any known law. For example, by their nature, quantum events are indeterminate in part because both possibilities involve equivalent transfers of energy; the ambiguity of outcome reflects physics' ambivalence toward the outcomes.

Consciousness is about thinking which is about information. It is not about stronger muscles or more efficient digestive enzymes. If randomness were secretly nonrandom, it provides a conduit for information to get from consciousness to physics, whereupon physics simply needs to evolve a suitable instrument and amplifier to pick up and use the signal. (Hopefully you noticed I'm cheating here. I {think I} found such a device and then concluded that physics needs it; however, I've hopefully shown it's possible to do it the right way around.)

"When a person decides to walk across a room, it is generally understood that the decision to do so, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in that person's brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in his walking across the room. The problem is that if there is something totally nonphysical causing a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no physical event which causes the firing."

It's not hard to understand how to route around this now we've made computers.

The random event was going to fire anyway. On one fork, it is not amplified; the signal hits an open switch and stops. On the other fork, the signal is amplified and continues until it is strong enough to cause muscle contraction patterns.

"Dualistic interactionism has therefore been argued against in that it violates a general heuristic principle of science: the causal closure of the physical world."

Begging the question is almost always a status move. Authority says physics is causally closed, which means it becomes impossible for anyone enthralled by Authority to believe in dualism. The scholastic community failed miserably when it allowed anyone vulnerable to Authority to claim to be a scholar. But of course such a thing is inevitable when you must espouse HNU.

"The first reply is that the mind may influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity, but such an influence still violates energy conservation."

Redistributing energy requires a force, which requires energy. That is, either La Wik is misconstruing their arguments, or their arguments have a contradiction. If consciousness affected energy in this way, we could simply construct a model and do an experiment, rather than having to faff about with logic. It is ignorant to believe consciousness can rearrange energy but cannot be detected by experiment.

"The second possibility is to deny that the human body is causally closed, as the conservation of energy applies only to closed systems. However, physicalists object no evidence exists for the causal non-closure of the human body."

Begging the question tends to corrupt downstream thought.

As above, the key is to find a physical non-closure that does not violate physical conservation. While a modern dualist has no problem with a partly-physical and partly-mental entity, physical energy is still purely physical and cannot be converted to or from mental energy, meaning its conservation cannot be affected by mental contact.

"An overdetermined event is fully accounted for by multiple causes at once.^[65] However, J. J. C. Smart and Paul Churchland have pointed out that if physical phenomena fully determine behavioral events, then by Occam's razor an unphysical mind is unnecessary."

Indeed. Unfortunately, I still observe that I have consciousness. I suggest you observe yourself to determine if you also have consciousness. If an unphysical mind is unnecessary, dualism is true. (But I still think epiphenomenalism is absurd.)

Let us go through the entities once again.

You perceive a blue box that's really there. There's a box, the photons, your eye and the interaction, the visual cortex, and the blue-box-quale.

We can separate most of these out by instead supposing you dream of a blue box. Still there is the visual cortex and the blue-box-quale.

Perhaps quale just is the visual cortex? If it was, you could fully re-create the cortex by examining the properties of the quale. Perhaps the quale represents merely part of the cortex? A feature of the cortex? Then you could re-create that part. It is not the cortex.

"Another reply to this objection, given by Robinson, is that there is a possibility that the interaction may involve dark energy, dark matter or some other currently unknown scientific process.^[9]  However, such processes would necessarily be physical, and in this case dualism is replaced with physicalism, or the interaction point is left for study at a later time when these physical processes are understood."

Conservation of mystery fails again.
Put precisely, a dark matter interaction puts an upper bound on how much energy shuttling consciousness involves. While the brain is a noisy place, the bound is still low since we can access and do experiments on individual neurons.

"If a nondeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct then microscopic events are indeterminate, where the degree of determinism increases with the scale of the system (see Quantum decoherence)."

On my ideas: standing on the shoulders of giants, etc.

"Philosophers Karl Popper and John Eccles and physicist Henry Stapp have theorized that such indeterminacy may apply at the macroscopic scale."

Specifically, I am certain, it is possible to amplify the indeterminacy. How certain? To the point it's boring. The phrencell might not work for a variety of reasons, but if it doesn't, I will merely directly address the reasons it doesn't by changes in the design until it does so work.

"However classical and quantum calculations show that quantum decoherence effects do not play a role in brain activity.^[68] Indeed, macroscopic quantum states have only ever been observed in superconductors near absolute zero."

Wrong tree. Same wrong tree the 'quantum is woo' folk go up. The correct thing to try to amplify and exploit is not superpositions and entanglement, but the collapse of such things. Work with Nature, not against Her.

"Thomas Breuer in 1994 had proven  that physical theories valid for the whole universe are impossible. Any theory will be wrong when applied to a system which contains the observer himself due to self-reference.^{[dubious – discuss]}  This proves that the observer's own body does not follow the same physical laws as the rest of the universe. But other people from the observer's point of view will obey the usual physical laws, so conducting experiments on them would not indicate any divergence from the physical predictions."

Indeed dubious. Nevertheless, without going into overkill analysis of this theory, it correctly predicts the existence of a subjective-objective split. That two complex theories reach the same prediction constitutes independent corroboration. While I have privileged information that I did not know until now about Breuer, you should probably doubt; corroboration is most useful internally.

There's also something here about physics not knowing what physics is going to do, yet managing to do it anyway. I will try to work out what.

Right, of course. Each particle constitutes a valid frame of reference, but (in principle) cannot predict its interaction with the rest of physics. All such frames being valid, it means physics cannot predict itself.

That means we have a complex of three independent complex theories. Even if I tried to defraud you by hearing of both before coming up with mine, by making it consistent with both I would constrain myself so tightly I would have no choice in what theory I espoused. There's astronomical odds against one of them being false and either of the others not-false.

Incidentally overkill analysis shows that it can be seen as both true and false, depending on which questions you answer "I don't care" to, and that it's not that the observer doesn't obey the laws, but rather 'do I obey the laws?' is a wrong question; the predictive answer is neither 'no' nor 'yes.'

"Robin Collins responds that energy conservation objections misunderstand the role of energy conservation in physics. Well understood scenarios in general relativity violate energy conservation and quantum mechanics provides precedent for causal interactions, or correlation without energy or momentum exchange."

Quite.

"This argument has been formulated by Paul Churchland, among others. The point is that, in instances of some sort of brain damage  (e.g. caused by automobile accidents, drug abuse, pathological diseases, etc.), it is always the case that the mental substance and/or properties of the person are significantly changed or compromised. If the mind were a completely separate substance from the brain, how could it be possible that every single time the brain is injured, the mind is also injured?"

There's a fundamental logical problem here.
In unidirectional causation epiphenomenalism, we can't know the mind is damaged. It's completely inaccessible to both other minds and every body. We have an equivocation on 'mind.'

If physics is meaningfully unclosed without consciousness, the quote isn't even unintuitive, let alone a problem.

"Property dualism and William Hasker's "emergent dualism" seek to avoid this problem. They assert that the mind is a property or substance that emerges from the appropriate arrangement of physical matter, and therefore could be affected by any rearrangement of matter."

Emergent properties don't real. They're not reductionist, and rescuing reductionalist physicalism is the whole point of proposing them. They are magic - somehow, arranging paint into a star-like line shape causes the paint to do things that can't be predicted without observing previous such arrangements.

If it can be predicted from more base properties, the emergent properties die to Ockham's razor.

"Phineas Gage, who suffered destruction of one or both frontal lobes by a projectile iron rod, is often cited as an example illustrating that the brain causes mind."

I wish I didn't have to be rude, but here's enough unstated assumptions to choke a bison.

It affected his behaviour. How do you know it affected his mind? If he told you so, how do you know he wasn't lying? It is very, very important to know the mind's True Name.

"Case studies aside, modern experiments have demonstrated that the relation between brain and mind is much more than simple correlation. By damaging, or manipulating, specific areas of the brain repeatedly under controlled conditions (e.g. in monkeys) and reliably obtaining the same results in measures of mental state and abilities, neuroscientists have shown that the relation between damage to the brain and mental deterioration is likely causal. This conclusion is further supported by data from the effects of neuro-active chemicals (such as those affecting neurotransmitters) on mental functions, but also from research on neurostimulation (direct electrical stimulation of the brain, including transcranial magnetic stimulation)."

Begging the question. If dualism is true, the correct way to do such experiments is on yourself. Others may be lying, mistaken, or inarticulate. Even if they speak honestly and apprehend correctly, ultimately you must compare their reports to your own internal life to know what they're talking about.

If you insist on being agnostic on the existence of that life, you cannot conclude anything about the mind.

If you admit you have an internal life, then there's no need for the experiment.

If you assume you don't have one, there's no need for an experiment.

Subjective events are not objective and cannot be investigated objectively.

"Another common argument against dualism consists in the idea that since human beings (both phylogenetically and ontogenetically) begin their existence as entirely physical or material entities and since nothing outside of the domain of the physical is added later on in the course of development, then we must necessarily end up being fully developed material beings."

While not surprising, it is still feels disappointing that such weak arguments are afforded enough status to appear in Wikipedia.

Humans; life in general; existence in general did not start out fully material. Next?

"In some contexts, the decisions that a person makes can be detected up to 10 seconds in advance by means of scanning their brain activity. Furthermore subjective experiences and covert attitudes can be detected, as can mental imagery. This is strong empirical evidence that cognitive processes have physical basis in the brain."

Assuming the scientists can correctly interpret their findings. Not only is this dubious in general, the entire basis of the dualist argument is a different interpretation of the facts.

(The advance decision experiments work on things humans do not inherently care about. It's hard to press a button at all, let alone to see one button or another as identity-confirming, among other problems. The researchers inherently disrespected consciousness and constructed a self-confirming prophecy.)

A modern dualist does not deny the causal chain runs through the brain.

The advance decision experiment confirms the existence of a quale separate from the actual processing of the brain. By appearing a different time, the 'decision' cannot be feeling of decision. Moreover, this quale feeds back into physical brain processes that allow the subject's larynx to report when it occurred.

"The argument from simplicity is probably the simplest and also the most common form of argument against dualism of the mental."

Ahem, "...but no simpler." The physicalist predicts I don't have an inner life. I do have an inner life.

I predict they don't have an inner life. :-)

"This argument was criticized by Peter Glassen in a debate with J. J. C. Smart in the pages of Philosophy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Glassen argued that, because it is not a physical entity, Occam's Razor cannot consistently be appealed to by a physicalist or materialist as a justification of mental states or events, such as the belief that dualism is false."

A real argument by a real person, defeated by logic, except it was an embarrassment to its allies in the first place, meaning no doubt thereby falls on healthier versions of the argument.

'Tin man' was proposed, but that's already taken for, apparently, portraying libertarians as heartless.

Pig iron man? Copper man? Gold man? (Glitters nice, but not exactly robust...)

Now I'm going to go eat, come back, and, if I'm not interrupted see if Stanford's online encyclopedia can do better. If they can't, I'm going to declare I've returned the serve, the burden of proof is now in the opposite half.

Assuming Traditionalism, Progressivism Follows

Progressivism is Traditionalism philosophically purified. Philosophy grants consistency which grants power. This is why Progressivism is more powerful than Traditionalism and always wins.

(See also: Progressivism's cousins in evil like Communism.)
(I guess I feel I haven't been meeting my 'offend everyone' quota.)
(Includes: coercion and leadership; why we use evidence instead of argument; how philosophy is power; miscellaneous.)

Traditionalism has many particular local forms, but they all have something in common: they feel it is legitimate to force certain people to join the tradition or to prevent them leaving.

Digression for coercion and leadership: 

Coercion needs to be very precisely defined, even if the only consideration was not getting its bad connotation cooties on things that don't deserve it. I won't bore you with the details, but the upshot is when you choose a leader, you agree to let them punish you and thus the punishment stops being coercion. This allows most of Traditionalism's practices to survive.

Because Traditionalism legitimizes coercion, the only thing the Progressive has to do is seize the coercive legitimization apparatus, instead of having to create it from scratch. The Progressive will always succeed in these contests, because they value power most highly. (Power lust is one way of precisely defining a Progressive.)

A Traditionalist always values something else most highly. Honour. Community. Religion. Truth. Power is only a means to the Traditionalist. As a result, Progressives will always win. They will sacrifice anything to get power. A Traditional won't. Can't, or they stop being a Traditionalist; imagine a Catholic sacrificing the Pope to defeat a Progressive. Not only will the Progressive save money by sacrificing work-life balance, they can always win with a fork strategy, threatening the Pope until the Catholic submits or defects to the Jedi.

To put the point none too gently, Progressivism's defiled source of power is the Traditionalist's black heart. Sauron cannot make, only mock. Without seizing that heart, Progressivsim cannot animate its sludge-filled limbs.



In present times, the backlash is starting. Russians really get that Communism is evil. It took a lot of doing, but they learned. Progressivism, being purified evil, also teaches this lesson and thus sows the seeds of its own demise. As cultural immunity builds it will become weak and eventually Traditionalists will re-assert themselves, as indeed they seem to be doing already in China and Russia.

However, this is only temporary. Coercion will still be legitimate. Progressivism's scions will cloak themselves in new lies and seek power once again, still willing to sacrifice everything, and thus will win again.

There is only one way to prevent this: purge the black heart. Coercion is evil. It's making you sick. Admit it. Stop it.


--


Most who read this will react negatively to the conclusion. I understand that logic is not persuasive.

Either I'm right or I'm wrong.

If I'm right, then it should be possible to reasonably deflate the objections. But if this were true, philosophy would not be a mess, it would be like math. If I'm right, it's still easy to soothe the cognitive dissonance.

If I'm wrong, then it should be impossible to deflate the objections. But if this were true, philosophy...

It's worth fixing this. When argument is true, it is extremely powerful.

If you can correctly apprehend the properties of a thing - if you know its True Name so to speak - you can perform logic on it. Sound logic is predictive.

This is best done by eliminating contradictions, rather than trying for positive identification. If X has property y, then it cannot coexist with not-y. (If you look carefully, you can see I did it this way above.) Positive identification is much harder since so much can factor into the logic. I would need many more True Names, and I can never be sure I found them all.

That is, I can predict which societies will never work. Given a society that doesn't apparently contradict itself, I cannot predict if it will work, how well, or for how long. With philosophy, a good empirical description is sufficient. I don't need to run multi-century societal experiments. Unlike an engineer, I don't need to work out how such a thing will occur, I can merely be certain about what will not occur: a stable, non-autophagous Traditional society.



Until philosophy's use and power are appreciated, and the communication problem fixed, I luckily still have experiment. I predict Traditional societies will always be captured by a purer evil and destroyed from within. As of now, history is entirely on my side. Hubristically, I'm also thinking very long term: having said this now, in three or four hundred years we will be able to see the restoration fall again to the plague. Then, hopefully, this missive will somehow survive and finally help cause philosophy to be taken seriously and used properly, so the restoration can get laid low by something new this time around. (At least, the cost is small, and the possible upside is huge.)


--


It doesn't help that Christianity alienated philosophy when it turned out the Bible was not 100% true on the first try. I would like to know why anyone thinks Aristotle-vintage theology is any more impressive than Aristotle-vintage physics.

There's an argument that I made up the logic to fit the predictions, since naturally I knew of them before the logic. But if this is so, I must have ratiocinated fraudulently, and you should be able to find where.

The above means it was possible for the Romans to anticipate Moldbug if they had put in the effort. Christianity cannot win against more power-hungry heresies of Christianity. While it's hard to predict Progressivism per se, the Romans are indicted for ignorance since they did not predict Christianity's instability.

If I haven't ratiocinated fraudulently, I discover the logic, I don't invent it, which means it's inherently independent of Moldbug, who has already been independently corroborated a couple times. Given the mathematics of independent corroboration if I haven't committed accidental fraud then I'm almost certainly right.

Tu quoque is still a fallacy, but you'll find that you can't effectively condemn the evil you yourself require and practice.

Under certain conditions Traditionalism's missteps cancel out. If everyone who was going to be forced to join would have joined voluntarily, it's almost impossible to tell it apart from a non-evil tradition. For example, the family. The kids are not allowed to leave, but most of them wouldn't even if they could. Dark age villages probably had a similar situation because Exit's discipline was replaced by Death's cold steel, keeping the dark heart's cancerous tendrils well-trimmed.

As per usual, it's not really the Traditionalist's fault. Adam and Eve is a good myth, likely referring to agriculture. It's the cycle of violence writ across ten millennia, periodically reinforced by plagues and war. Break it once and it might even stop forever.

Mathematics of Independent Corroboration

I just worked out the mathematics of independent corroboration.

It is startlingly powerful, which makes it startlingly important to double and triple-check that the independence is truly independent.

Considering how easy this is, I should have seen it already, but I haven't. I did a quick check to see if I could find some prior art, but as predicted by my vague impression, couldn't find any. Best is this, which has no apparent math and seems generally weak.



While it's obvious to anyone who has formally studied physics that it's incredibly unlikely that two people get the same answer from different mistakes, it's nice to have an actual function.

If you have a theory and someone corroborates your theory with no prior contact, we have a nice truth matrix:

11

10

01

00


You're both right, only you're right, only they're right, and you're both wrong.

Nail this to something concrete and assume there's a 90% chance either of you are wrong independently. Taken separately, then the relative odds are 1%, 9%, 9%, and 81%.

However, the odds of 10 and 01 are incredibly low if the theories corroborate. (If they're not logically independent the way they were temporally independent. Say you theorize that fire makes grates hot, and they find a hot grate that had fire in it.)

You have some privileged information - you did not defraud the investigation. Therefore the odds of 10 are the odds that your epistemic misconduct just happened to precisely predict what they would see anyway. (If you did defraud, you could have targeted the fraud at their experiment to make your theory look good.)

The odds of 01 are also negligible. Out of all the mistakes and frauds they could possibly commit, why the one that makes you look good in particular? Especially as, if it's truly independent, they had or still have no knowledge of your theory?

Since probability is conserved, we have some free-floating percentage. Only, the odds that you're wrong haven't gone up, so 00 is still 81%. It all settles on 11, increasing it a whopping relative 1800%.

Thus we have some simple math.

Given an independent corroboration, the odds you're right is simply one minus the odds you're wrong times the odds they're wrong. f_knowlege(U,E) = 1 - (U*E). This function is linear in the odds you're wrong, which is entirely under your control. Having thought of epistemic misconduct, you can thoroughly ream your stuff for it until it is negligible, and thus be 100% certain. (To any reasonable number of significant figures, 99.99etc rounds to 100. Just don't let that make you forget how to learn.)

That is, linear in your error odds, but scaled up by the general climate of not-error. (E is constant as far as your force of will is concerned.)

A third independent corroboration basically guarantees you're right. It is 000 vs. 111 because 010 110 etc. all fall out. At 90% error, 000 is 73%. Still linear, and the up-scaling is even more aggressive. At 50% average error, it's 88% likely you're right even without special effort.

Consciousness Machine: Refined

Sometimes I call it a phrencell, a little room of the mind. (Mixing Greek and Latin because trolling.)

I'm not certain I'm correct. I'm merely certain that I haven't been rebutted, yet, but the point isn't necessarily to be right. The point is to show that the box has an outside to go look around; the point is to show what kind of thing Decartes' pineal gland will look like in physical implementation. For example, even if I'm wrong, it's clear enough that physics doesn't have to be causally closed, and that dualism is compatible with naturalism.



One example of the machine is this:

Take an FPGA. Hook its output into its configuration register, so when it runs it re-programs itself. To its input, hook a true-random source, so it re-programs itself randomly. Ideally the FPGA will have infinite gates so it can, in principle, be programmed with any program and thus emit arbitrary bitstreams.

I imagine a pentagon of five anodes and an electron in a superposition of being about to be absorbed by all of them. If we're feeling mystic (I am) the pentagon is an oracle and the FPGA is its interpreter.  It probably helps but probably isn't necessary to let the FPGA bias the oracle, for example tuning the voltages on the anodes.

I assert that the probability of the FPGA at any present time is in a state of both 100% and 0% probability. The previous input had a 0% probability, all past states had a 0% probability, but of course it's right there. Look at it. The present has a 100% probability.

Future evolution has a well-defined probability. For example, with the pentagon, the FPGA will have five possible evolutions with average 20% probability. We can just look at it and compute the probability, entirely straightforward. Except that when one of those states becomes the present, it too will have a 0% probability, because it evolved from a state with 0% probability.

The reason it has a 0% probability is because at infinite time, the (ideal) FPGA has an infinite number of possible states, which means at most infinitesimal probability for any one state, which is physically identical to zero. Which is to say it can't happen, it's impossible. Normally we can ignore things at infinity for physical purposes; parallel lines cross at infinity, so what. All particles decay by infinity - that's just physics speak for 'never.' No observer will ever observe the decay of certain particles. (Neutrons and electrons?)

However, the FPGA is, at any time, in a state bit-for-bit identical to an impossible state, because states are degenerate in time. As long as the configuration register is properly set up, the FPGA is allowed to have constant states, cyclical states, random states or chaotic states. This means the FPGA cannot know if it reached its current state by passing through infinity or not. (E.g: a constant state that might have not been constant, but happened not to be.) Which means we, as the observers, cannot know whether it passed through infinity or not. Which means everything that is true at infinity must be true now, at the present. Which means its past and current states have a probability indistinguishable from zero.

But it's still right there. Paradox.

My solution to the paradox is to say that the FPGA's future states in fact never had a probability. Quantum events look like probability because they're a special case of non-probability. Namely, if the canvas of possibilities is finite, then no matter what you do you'll converge on some probability distribution. (This is why consciousness' effects on physics are about information - bitstreams have few inherent limitations.)

Specifically, quantum objects have a quantum of consciousness and free will (with respect to physics). As it turns out, if you have 6*10^24 persons with no memory and only two options, the variations in personality and whim will cancel out and converge on some well-defined probability. If you have 6*10^24 randomly selected persons, there's guaranteed to be a representative sample of all personalities, which means you're measuring the average personality, and will do so reliably.

However, if you hook only one personality up to a randomness amplifier, none of this holds, and the true non-deterministic, non-stochastic nature of the beast emerges. (Specifically, the phrencell deliberately breaks the independence clause of independent random events.) This is why the interpreter may need to be able to bias the oracle. The oracle needs to be able to feel the circuit or it won't be able to tell what it's doing and thus shape the interpreter to its will.

Exit

@Nick_B_Steves @mr_archenemy Until you inflict a "muh shekels" on us, you're fully entitled to exempt yourself. As is the great @RiverC
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) June 24, 2014

(Referred post.)

Someone should explain Exit from the ground up. This turns out to be difficult, I tried to re-think my approach but it is probably still bad.

Among libertarian personalities it isn't necessary, we seek out justifications for Exit and large chunks of it don't need to be explained at all. For non-libertarians the thought pattern is unnatural and they're certainly not going to grab some spears and go hunting for the missing bits.

Naturally the non-libertarian thought pattern is unnatural for me so I'll likely still miss important bits, but at least I'm aware it's a problem, so I can attempt to fix it.

The essence of Exit is its purpose. Its purpose is to prevent corruption of institutions. Kindness out of the goodness of their hearts is unstable. All institutions need Gnon's discipline to keep them even halfway honest. Exit is metonymously this discipline.

Voice is the other serious candidate. Voting and letters to the editor and complaining to your congresscritter and such. Voice clearly hasn't worked. Even if you go so far as to nail a bunch of theses to a relevant door.

At this point I would try to discard exosemanic gang signs as much as possible, but apparently I'm too fond of the big-E Exit flourish.

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The point is discipline. Exit is a good first approximation, but Exit empowers Voice and and opt-in is just as powerful as an opt-out; exit is essentially a two-syllable word for freedom of association. (Similarly, families are not normally in Exit's domain of validity, because genetics imposes its own discipline; I'm sure you can think of other exceptions.)

The essence of Exit is discipline, and the essence of discipline is survival. To truly have Exit, the institution's survival must be under the power of its putative beneficiaries. History shows this is the only way putative beneficiaries will match actual beneficiaries.

Exit is only important at the State level. To be more specific, the level of legitimized coercion. No other level is capable of sustaining non-Exit.

Exit is not absolute, but discipline obtains to the extent Exit obtains.



Exit empowers Voice, and Voice without Exit is merely the illusion of Voice. I need not explain how voting is a placebo at best. By contrast, the fact you can Exit a restaurant gives you great Voice. The restaurant needs you, and thus is willing to negotiate so you don't exercise Exit. Moreover, Exit gives you almost all the bargaining power. If the manager is unwilling to give you a good bargain, you can eat at home. The restaurant can be run according to any official mission whatsoever; since its survival depends on diners, it will be run for the benefit of diners.

Restaurants are both opt-in and opt-out. But either is enough. For example, the Amish are opt-in. Baptism is performed at age 18-21, in other words, with the full consent of the baptised. After this the new member of the community is subject to extra punishments and duties, but also has new potential and actual privileges. These privileges are enough to sell 90% of Amish children on the lifelong contract. If they were not, then the Amish would have boiled off their entire population by now, and this continuing existential threat keep their rules reasonable. (I've seen claims that incentives work through trial and error. I disagree. Dire apes suddenly become much, much better at logic when their material interest is at stake.)

Similarly, I could have no objection to opt-in slavery, or opt-out hereditary serfdom. (Especially as either would likely die a quick, gruesome death. It's entirely unnecessary to make them illegal.)

(Ancap / neon hillist digression: coercion shouldn't be legitimate. It is a falsehood and is the fundamental reason empires collapse. The obvious solution, given this, makes Exit natural.)

The trick, then, is to marry legitimate coercion and Exit. But stating the problem clearly immediately solves it: if coercion can be imbued with moral legitimacy, then so can Exit. A State which disdains Exit is disdaining discipline and should be treated as if it were saying as much. (Ancap digression: families also. 'Good enough' is not good enough.)

The Catholic church immediately jumps to mind. Why was excommunication so fearsome? Because the State cooperated. To be excommunicated was to be an outlaw, lacking protection of the courts.

I repeat: only Exit from the State and State-sponsored institutions is worth worrying about. (Ancap digression: cops return runaways because having urchins around is embarrassing.)



The perception of primary Voice mitigates the sacred power of Exit, and thus discipline, and thus institutions become zombies of their former selves, interested only in devouring your flesh.

Though vitiated, Exit does somewhat exist in the modern world, but it is expensive. If you're not already deracinated, it means deracinating yourself. Real estate is monetarily and temporally expensive to liquidate, as are other important forms of wealth. Moreover, the Progressive, afeared of Exit, has seized all Anglophonia and much beyond. You cannot meaningfully leave without abandoning not only friend and family connections, but your entire culture. Rhodesia was an attempt to Exit. Germany was, twice, an attempt to Exit. (Hitler as a manifestation of cultural claustrophobia.) Progressivism is terrified of Exit, as it is of all sacred powers, and will employ every obstacle it can get away with.

Anything that Man can make, Man can unmake. Were Exit re-sacralized in place of voting, the affected States will use every tactic in their power to route around it. To truly work, this wisdom would have to be sunk deep.

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Miscellaneous comments:

The patricians can always Exit. Kim Jong-Un's strategy: make a foreign visit. Stay instead of going back. There's a whole magazine made up of former officials. While not simple, it can't be halted. Exit is for the immediate benefit of plebeians, and only for society as a whole in the long term.

Before Luther, was paganism your only alternative to Catholicism? I notice many of Luther's reasonable objections have since been fixed.

This law can be temporarily. Sudden, unexpected shocks can work, but only insofar as they are unexpected, and executing them spends the element of surprise. Capturing intellectuals as slaves, for example, will cause other scholars to hide their abilities, desolating the source.

Property and Objective Morality

This isn't particularly new, I'm merely repairing the categorical imperative.

Sections:
1: Justification of morality per se.
2: Not-property is invalid.
3: Security.
4: The moral consequences of preferences, promises, and self-defence
5. Community consequences of moral preferences.
6. Government briefly.
7. Coercion defined exactly.
8. God, tyrants, physics, and prudence.
9. Soundbite and miscellaneous comments.



1.

Humans are similar enough that stating that one need or need not justify their actions implies that all of them need or need not justify their actions in the same way. Put another way, arguing about whether humans should have prescriptive norms is not useful. It is like arguing whether humans should have two arms: they do in fact have two arms, and no amount of rhetoric will change that fact. In either case, we see that the categorical imperative is not high philosophical theory, but a humble consequence of humans being embedded in biology.

It turns out the argument that humans need not justify their actions is self-defeating. It turns out that given that humans form norms, there is a correct norm, which is property defined as reasonable expectation of control.

The search for objective morality has been similar to the research on the problem of induction; it looks for a positive proof or argument that morality obtains. The searches are misguided for a similar reason.

When I claim that I need not justify my actions, either unilateral actions or actions upon you, I become ontologically committed to the position that you need not justify your actions either. Therefore, I become ontologically committed to the position that you may unilaterally, without justification, form a norm that you do need to justify your actions, which ontologically commits you to believing I need to justify my actions. Therefore, assuming my assertion is true, it justifies believing my assertion is false.

The belief that actions need not be justified is self-contradictory.

The statement [morality & !morality] reduces to [morality & morality], which is always true. The search for justification of morals per se will, as Hume intuited, never be successful. It's just that I cannot safely believe the opposite, and so by process of elimination, morality must obtain.



2.

Specific norms can be self-contradictory in the same way, so let's talk about reasonable expectation of control.

Property cannot be mere control as there would be no need for the word 'property,' it would simply be a synonym. Second, it would make theft meaningless - theft would simply be one valid transfer of property - and theft is not meaningless. Property is at least the expectation of control, which theft deliberately violates.

Let's talk about theft without loss of generality. If theft is the norm, then objects will be swiftly destroyed, until nobody can uphold the norm. I know where my wallet is and I control it. If instead pickpockets were endemic, I would not expect to control my wallet. I would therefore not acquire a wallet in the first place, and thus neither would the pickpockets. If theft is not suppressed directly, then it suppresses the objects it preys upon until it suppresses itself.

Similarly, as per Kant, deception cannot be a norm, because it can only exist parasitically on trust.

If property were merely expectation of control, then the thief would be proving me wrong. I thought I had property rights in my wallet, but I didn't because hey look, there it goes. Wave to the wallet, it's having a vacation. If I take the wallet back, ditto. To define theft, I must define property as reasonable expectation of control. Conversely, if I leave my wallet on a boulder all day and expect it to still be there when I get back, I'm insane. While it would be nice if I could, as a matter of fact I can't, and therefore it's not reasonable.

Note that under REC, the thief creates the normative contradiction by stealthily changing the arrangement of facts, and can, at any time before the theft, release the contradiction. This is an asymmetry you can hang moral asymmetries on.



3.

Property can grow: the act of changing an expectation from insane to reasonable is the action of securing. I could chain my wallet to the boulder.

If it were possible to physically prevent all theft, vandalism and so on, we would do so. But what man makes, man can unmake. You can chain your wallet to the rock, and I can bring bolt-cutters. We need a system of rules to know when an invalid, self-defeating norm has been advocated. This too is covered by 'reasonable.' When a reasonable amount of security has been applied, it is invalid to circumvent it.

In philosophy 'reasonable' is a weasel word. If I didn't have to use it, I wouldn't. Nevertheless, in practice e.g. English Common Law seems perfectly capable of defining 'reasonable.' Once established, the specific boundaries are not important, only that they exist. More generally, an ancap security firm would tell subscribers in advance what they will and will not consider secure, and thus what they will and will not insure.



4.

That not-property is invalid means all norms either subsume themselves under property or are themselves invalid. This is a surprisingly flexible condition.

Reasonable expectation of control implies that whatever your preferences are, you can attempt to arrange your property such that it upholds and advances them. Preferences that can be validly upheld in this way are called values. All preferences that must infringe on someone else's property are invalid. Since this logical property of the definition of property rights covers all conventional crimes, I call this set of logical properties of the world 'morality.'

Murder is violating your property rights in your body, (technologically inalienable, incidentally) and if it is justified for me to murder you, then it must be equally justified for you to murder me first. And so on for fraud, vandalism, rape, battery, and even rudeness.

Here's the surprising ones:
It is not valid to proselytize without an invitation. I have the right to control the contents of my brain and so do you. If I want to believe what are lies and heresies from your perspective, then I'm entitled to do so, even if your proselytizing would change my mind, and even if it would be better for me if I changed my mind. (Real intellectual property, not the unsecurable nonsense the MPAA claims.)

Promises are morally omnipotent with regard to my property. If I say you can kill me, then it is impossible to murder me. I agreed to it. Incidentally, you have full permission to proselytize to me about anything.

Absent promises and thus contracts, self-defence is absolute and unlimited. Such extremes aren't usually necessary, but they are justifiable. In a Hobbesian state of nature, if I so much as swear in your vicinity, there is no moral reason you can't immediately blow my leg off and leave me to bleed to death. By so swearing, I have stated that I don't need to justify intrusions on your otological property, which implies I don't need to justify intruding on your property generally, and thus by symmetry you have no need to justify intruding on my vital property. Any action to prevent further intrusions is justifiable.

I have not signed a contract stating I won't blow your leg off for no good reason. I have not sworn or even suggested it. We are in fact in a Hobbesian state of nature, morally speaking. I think this is bad. A main reason I wish to fully develop a theory of morality is to fix things like being in a Hobbesian state of nature.



5.

In a community who all share the same preferences, (almost) fully arbitrary religions can be justified within property rights. There is nothing Islamic that Muslims cannot validly do to each other. If you believe you should be able to swear at me without repercussion, and I believe the same, then when I swear at you the self-defence logic is not tripped. If either of us wish to claim it's wrong to be sworn at, we don't have a leg to stand on.

The problem appears when multiculturalism obtains. Muslims think they can treat Christians in the Muslim way, and Christian believe they can treat Muslims the Christian way. Both are invalid. Understandable perhaps, but immoral.



6.

Government briefly:

If I had signed a contract saying I had to pay taxes, then taxes would be completely fine. Predictable etc. I can reasonably know how much of my income will be garnished. I didn't. The government is entirely indifferent to what I prefer. By symmetry I should be able to be entirely indifferent to what government prefers. They use violence to make this not the case. Thus it must be valid for me to use violence to change their mind. Unwise, perhaps, but valid.

Every government has used a theory of legitimacy, and they were all lies.   It's as if they have already intuited this theory and feel the need to pre-empt such objections. Every government has tacitly admitted it was illegitimate.

Because government is morally parasitical in the way that lies are, it becomes physically parasitical. It's inherent to the enterprise. Historically, there have been several moral advances, and in each case they have made the adoptees richer. In some cases, vastly richer. Having the first morally righteous government should follow this pattern.



7.

Coercion can be precisely defined. It is any trespass of the principles of property rights. It is to deliberately interrupt the expectation of control. Physical violence may or may not be moral violence, but if it is, it's coercion. All coercion is inherently parasitic and self-negating.



8.

Let's talk about God for a bit.

Many have wanted morality to be self-enforcing. But if it were self-enforcing, it would merely be prudence.

If God sends you to Hell, He converts the good to the prudent by force. Walking backwards from this ideal, what if an earthly entity wishes to grant themselves the power of immorality by force? If you don't have enough force to stop them, then they win. Turns out physics is unjust, because if it were just, there would be no need for morality, neither the fact of it nor a theory of it.

For morality to be able to restrain a tyrant, it would have to be meaningless. Put another way, there's broadly two kinds of humans: ones that don't need a theory of morality because they are basically decent and kind, and ones that will reject any theory because they're basically vicious. In any possible situation, the latter kind must be restrained by force. At the individual level, the purpose of a theory is for edge cases (me) and to cut off the rhetorical escape routes used by the latter kind.

Intriguingly, you must understand that morality might be a thing to be bound by it. If it never occurs to me that actions might need a justification, then I don't need to justify my actions. For example, Adam and Eve before they ate of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. It won't ever occur to me that actions upon me might need justification either. Thus, livestock.



9.

Taking sections 4 and 5 together, morality is this: do not unto others as they would have you not do unto them. Where 'self' and 'other' are defined on secured property rights. If we're talking variants on the Golden Rule, this is beyond Platinum and into Osmium or something.

This theory is mainly consistent with English Common Law and various other existent social arrangements. As in physics, the plan is not to try to overturn everything we know, but to know it more deeply and precisely, so we can take it farther and error-check what we've done so far.
Similarly, as per section 9, morality is a logical property of actions, rather than something you can physically experiment on. As a result, there can be no evidence aside from philosophy that a thing is moral, immoral, or amoral. I feel this property is a necessary condition for any theory that claims to be moral; that it can be violated without obvious consequences. (Trying to disobey gravity is just unwise.)
Nevertheless, I believe I've found Hume's Is. To repeat: non-justification is self-contradictory and/or humans form norms anyway, the fact humans are sufficiently similar, and the fact that humans have preferences. The logic has reached a state where if I do happen to be wrong, it most likely can be repaired.

Morality does require free will in some sense. Calling a rock immoral is just dumb; it can't do other than what it in fact did. This is useful backwards; if you can't negotiate with an entity to make it act otherwise than it naturally does, then it isn't a moral entity.

The combination of flexibility and power surprises me.

It worries me somewhat that it is purely anarcho-capitalist. Of course an ancap is going to work out that ancap intuitions are all correct. Nevertheless if it were purely tribal I should be able to find a logical or empirical inconsistency, and I cannot. For example there are no inconsistencies between my definition of property and what is normally called property, for sub-example taxes are treated as government property but not called such, again as if they already intuit the theory.